While there is much to celebrate in WordPress sometimes we must also mourn. In a horribly tragic incident, Zeel Thakkar, a WordPress contributor and Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship 2025 recipient, passed away on stage at WordCamp Surat. WordCamp Asia has written a beautiful memo … | Continue reading
While there is much to celebrate in WordPress sometimes we must also mourn. In a horribly tragic incident, Zeel Thakkar, a WordPress contributor and Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship 2025 recipient, passed away on stage at WordCamp Surat. WordCamp Asia has written a beautiful memo … | Continue reading
Two interesting AI updates this week: It’s nice to read Andrej Karpathy’s review of Tesla’s FSD v13, as someone who was involved with creating their first self-driving efforts. I’ve only experienced v12, so very excited to try out the latest generations soon. Ubiquitous self-driv … | Continue reading
It’s been hard for me to write about Friday because it was so overwhelming, to see so many friends and loved ones and teachers and mentors there, including friends of my late Father’s I hadn’t seen in years, and to be with all of the people who have been driving the mission of th … | Continue reading
In case you missed it, Kanye has started apologizing for the event he went through. I didn’t comment on it publicly when it happened because it seemed so strange to me that such a beautiful soul, who had created so much life-changing music with so much love, could express such ha … | Continue reading
Choose your heroes very carefully and then emulate them. You will never be perfect, but you can always be better. I’m an unabashed fan of Warren Buffett and the late Charllie Munger, I even have bronze busts of them in my office! I was very lucky to attend his last shareholder me … | Continue reading
The story of what Bending Spoons has built is very impressive, and I’m a customer of theirs through Evernote, WordPress uses Meetup a ton. I think Automattic’s Noho office used to belong to Meetup. They’ve built an incredible engineering and product culture that can terraform tec … | Continue reading
I’ve been following this cool open source project called Meshtastic, which is “An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network built to run on affordable, low-power devices.” I finally got some time to set it up tonight. It was super easy; you just flash the Meshtastic firm … | Continue reading
Check out Ben Thompson of Stratechery (one of the most valuable subscriptions) on The Benefits of Bubbles. | Continue reading
Mimi Lamarre at Switchboard Magazine has a delightful long read in The Curious Case of Kaycee Nicole, where, in the early days of online communities and blogging, a fake person claimed to have leukemia. The blogging community was relatively small back then, and I recall some of t … | Continue reading
I’m often on the other side, but it’s such a delight to be an interviewer, I really enjoy it and put a lot of work into coming up with questions and shaping a conversation I think will draw out something novel from the person. Besides the Distributed Podcast, I’ve had a chance at … | Continue reading
I just got off stage from the great dev/ai/nyc event with John Borthwick, we had a wide-ranging discussion that we’ll post online soon. We had hundreds of people in the room and hundreds on the waitlist… the energy in NYC is electric! As a few recommendations from the event, I re … | Continue reading
Most interviews I watch at 1.5-2x speed, but among my friends, we joke that there are a few people for whom we really enjoy their thoughts at 1x (shoutout to JT). I’m an unabashed fanboy of Andrej Karpathy (blogged nanochat Oct 13), and his interview with Dwarkesh is excellent. I … | Continue reading
Mia Elvasia has a great article about how they realized they were spending $635/yr across various plugins to get things that Jetpack offered bundled and often free. Save money! Jetpack is frequently overlooked as one of the most underappreciated plugins in the WordPress universe. … | Continue reading
Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. Kyle Kowalski has an amazing blog post exploring many aspects of this Zen Kōan, including some diversions into David Foster Wallace’s legendary commencement speech, This is Water. | Continue reading
This week, the Automattic Creed received its first-ever update, which I’ll describe as a minor point upgrade. This is the sentence before and after. I am in a marathon, not a sprint, and no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is by putting one foot in front … | Continue reading
Automattic has been working with the Internet Archive to develop a plugin to combat link rot, and it’s a plugin I’d encourage you to install. As the plugin says: When a linked page disappears, the plugin helps preserve your user experience by redirecting visitors to a reliable ar … | Continue reading
For smart, enterprising hackers Beeper is offering bounties of up to $50,000 for people who create open source bridges. | Continue reading
Live oaks reach branchesSunlight graces every leafWith gentle wisdom Inspired by the not-haiku on my ITO EN tea. (BTW the Automattic home page is all haiku since 2009.) | Continue reading
It’s very interesting to compare my Wikipedia article and my Grokipedia article. The Grokipedia version is much, much longer, and does a better job of listing my accomplishments versus some random recent controversy. (Will someone reading about me a hundred years from now care th … | Continue reading
On November 5th at our Noho office the legendary John Borthwick (investor in Twitter, Tumblr, Buzzfeed, Digg, Venmo…) and I will have a conversation on the future of the Open Web and human-centered AI. Please join us! | Continue reading
If you like rabbit holes, a wonderful way to spend your Sunday is in the writing of Zach Holman, an early engineer at Github and Gitlab. All are good, but a particular favorite of mine is UTC is enough for everyone …right? You don’t need to code to appreciate that time is a const … | Continue reading
The Atlantic November issue is lovely, focused on the American Revolution. I particularly enjoyed: So pick up a copy as you pass through an airport or by a newstand. I consider it a very worthwhile subscription. It might be better to read in print or through Apple News+ as their … | Continue reading
It’s a bit of Automattic lore, but although I founded the company in June 2005, CNET asked me to stay on for a few more months to finish out some projects, which I did. Our HR systems have me as the second employee, after Donncha O Caoimh (still at the company!) So today is my … … | Continue reading
I don’t get sick very often, but when it catches up to me it hits like a freight train. Just trying to keep all the plates spinning while operating at 10% capacity, been sleeping a ton. Today was in some ways better, some ways worse than yesterday. I try to avoid hospitals and em … | Continue reading
WooCommerce 10.3 is out, just in time for Black Friday / Cyber Monday, with some nice improvements to the checkout experience, tracking cost of goods sold, and a new beta MCP server, “This new feature enables AI assistants like Claude, Cursor, VS Code, or any other MCP-compatible … | Continue reading
Google has turned 25, which is wow, and they made a cute video about it: Of course I tried to visit the original howtocutapineapple.com site, and unfortunately saw a database error connection. From Archive.org it looks like whoever had that domain made a nice WordPress site. | Continue reading
I have some “grand theories” of software engineering: I think there are two tribes of engineers that complexify things or simplify things, and they are in eternal conflict. Complexify: Jamstack, headless, Contentstack, Contentful, DXP, DAM, micro-services. Simplify: WordPress, Si … | Continue reading
Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserti … | Continue reading
Since reading the Four Hour Workweek and Tim Ferriss I’ve been a bit of a bio-hacker, always trying weird and new stuff. Today was a new one! I did therapeutic plasma exchange (TPE), also known as plasmapheresis, which supposedly gives you all the benefits of parabiosis without, … | Continue reading
Howdy and bonjour! First, thank you so much, merci beaucoup, for having me at your WordCamp. I love the spirit of local communities gathering and helping each other learn and grow together. I wasn’t planning to speak; I was just going to attend this WordCamp, but since the organ … | Continue reading
There are a few writers who I follow religiously, and one is Matt Levine of Bloomberg’s Money Stuff. For business and finance it’s one of the smartest and funniest things you can read. Yesterday, I think for the first time, he mentioned WordPress! In the context of his quote on t … | Continue reading
Some days, like this morning when I almost missed my flight to WordCamp Canada in Ottawa, I’m so overwhelmed with the maelstrom of ideas and sparks of creation that it feels like waves crashing against a dam. There are so many ways I can imagine new software, new products, new wa … | Continue reading
Just last night I was re-watching Annie Hall to remember and honor Diane Keaton, and now the news that D’Angelo had passed. I’m writing this listening to Voodoo, one of the great albums of all time. That CD in my beater car in Houston was on constant rotation, the richness of the … | Continue reading
Probably the most interesting thing on the internet today is Andrej Karpathy’s nanochat, “a minimal, from scratch, full-stack training/inference pipeline of a simple ChatGPT clone in a single, dependency-minimal codebase.” 8,000 lines of beautiful code, as Simon Willison notes. I … | Continue reading
If you appreciate golf at all, the story of how Tiger Woods won the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach without knowing he was down to his last golf ball because of arcane rules is pretty interesting. | Continue reading
I’ve been trying to find time in my calendar to attend more WordCamps as I love meeting WordPressers all over the world. The stars aligned, and I’ll be swinging by WordCamp Canada next week. They’ve put together an amazing program, including open web pioneer and inventor Dave Win … | Continue reading
Sorry everybody, my @photomatt on Twitter has been hacked, I’m trying to regain account access, but it is not currently in my control. | Continue reading
I’d like to introduce you to Jeremy Kranz. With his career as an investor at Intel Capital, then GIC, which is the sovereign wealth fund of Singapore rumored to manage over $700B, to now running his own fund Sentinel Global, he has had a front-row seat to investments in industry … | Continue reading
I was reminded today of the profound marketing influence of Kathy Sierra, who was a pretty prolific blogger and speaker back in the day. I would summarize her thesis as such: Your best marketing and communication should talk about how you make your users awesome, not how you’re a … | Continue reading
One of the cooler companies I’ve seen in a while is LumaField, which does industrial CT scanning, as they describe it. Industrial X-ray CT (Computed Tomography) works on the same basic principle as medical CT, taking hundreds of X-ray images from different angles to capture the i … | Continue reading
Two of my favorite humans, Tim Ferriss and Pablos Holman, had a great interview together. Pablos has a great new book out, and Audrey Capital is a happy LP in his Deep Future fund. Of my many hacker friends, Pablos is probably the most public. | Continue reading
Beeper has a fun set of September updates, adding support for Google Voice, LinkedIn now runs on-device, typing indicators for Google Messages and Instagram, full Telegram custom emoji support, and more. | Continue reading
I have two interesting interviews to share with you today, the first is Lex Friedman interviewing Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram. I started using and advocating for Telegram back in 2015, and Audrey Capital was part of their aborted fundraise in 2018. As a software craftspe … | Continue reading
Tonight there was a lovely event at TinkerTendo by Ramen Frey and Karin Johnson of Good People Dinners, this one honoring David Gelles’ new book, Dirtbag Billionaire: How Yvon Chouinard Built Patagonia, Made a Fortune, and Gave It All Away. I’m a huge fan of Yvon Chouinard and re … | Continue reading
One of the things I hate most on the internet, and part of the reason I started WordPress, was to fight linkrot. Ever since 1998, when Tim Berners-Lee wrote “Cool URIs Don’t Change,” I’ve been obsessed with content management and ensuring that links don’t break. (BTW, TBL, a pion … | Continue reading
It’s so exciting to see what the creative minds like Nick Hamze or Tammie Lister are doing with Automattic’s AI vibe coding tool, Telex. Tammie is doing a Blocktober, a block every day this month of October, you should follow along. | Continue reading
Sometimes the battle for open source and freedom can take on very prosaic and practical terms, but the wins can benefit everybody. To give an example: In Beeper we need more memory for showing notifications, because we support end-to-end encryption for networks like Signal, but A … | Continue reading